Principal AIML Engineer

As a Principal AI Engineer you will serve as a senior technical leader responsible for transforming state-of-the-art AI research into scalable production-ready capabilities that create measurable value for our clients. You will lead the architecture engineering operationalization and ongoing reliability of advanced AI systems ensuring they can scale across enterprise environments while meeting rigorous standards for performance security resilience and responsible AI.

This role sits at the critical intersection of AI research engineering product development and operations. You will partner closely with world-class AI researchers product leaders and engineering teams to accelerate the journey from prototype to production. Your work will span some of the most advanced areas of AI including Large Language Models (LLMs) Trustworthy AI agentic systems and emerging AI technologies.

You will mentor engineers shape architecture guide production support strategy and serve as a thought leader for scaling AI across the addition to building and scaling AI solutions you will help establish an engineering culture that emphasizes operational excellence ownership reliability and continuous improvement.

Key Responsibilities:

AI Architecture & Technical Leadership

• Define and lead the technical architecture for enterprise-scale AI and ML platforms.

• Design scalable resilient and reusable AI systems capable of supporting mission-critical workloads.

• Establish architectural standards engineering patterns and best practices for AI deployment and operations.

• Drive technical decisions around model serving inference optimization agent architectures orchestration frameworks observability and AI infrastructure.

Productize AI Research

• Partner closely with AI researchers to transform cutting-edge prototypes into production-grade solutions.

• Lead efforts to operationalize advanced AI capabilities across areas such as:

• Large Language Models (LLMs)

• Trustworthy and Responsible AI

• Agentic AI Systems

• Establish repeatable pathways that accelerate innovation-to-production cycles.

• Ensure production solutions maintain scientific rigor while meeting enterprise engineering standards.

• Bridge the gap between research breakthroughs and sustainable business value.

Engineering Excellence & Scalability

• Solve the organizations most complex AI engineering and scalability challenges.

• Design systems that operate reliably at enterprise scale while balancing performance latency governance security and cost.

• Drive adoption of MLOps LLMOps and AI platform engineering best practices.

• Improve the robustness maintainability observability and operational readiness of our AI products.

• Identify and eliminate architectural bottlenecks that impact scale reliability or client experience.

• Raise standards through coaching architecture reviews design guidance and technical leadership.

Production Reliability & Operational Leadership

• Own the operational excellence reliability performance and availability of our products.

• Lead technical response and resolution efforts for complex production incidents performance degradation model failures and system outages.

• Serve as the senior technical escalation point for the teams most challenging production challenges.

• Establish best practices for AI system monitoring observability alerting incident management capacity planning and service-level objectives (SLOs).

• Mentor and lead junior engineers in troubleshooting root cause analysis operational decision-making and incident response.

• Drive post-incident reviews focused on learning continuous improvement and long-term corrective actions.

• Develop operational processes that ensure AI solutions remain secure scalable performant and reliable for business-critical use cases.

• Partner with product infrastructure security and support teams to proactively identify operational risks and continuously improve service reliability.

Mentorship & Thought Leadership

• Mentor AI and ML engineers within the team.

• Foster a culture of technical excellence and operational ownership where engineers are accountable not only for building systems but also for running and supporting them successfully in production.

• Represent our team as a thought leader in scalable AI deployment operational excellence and responsible AI practices.

Required Qualifications

• 10 years of experience in software engineering machine learning engineering AI engineering or related technical disciplines.

• Deep expertise designing deploying and supporting large-scale AI and ML systems in production environments.

• Demonstrated success leading complex technical initiatives from concept through deployment and ongoing operations.

• Strong knowledge of software architecture reliability engineering observability ML Ops DevOps and cloud technologies.

• Proven ability to mentor engineers and lead teams through highly complex technical and operational challenges.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with foundation models Large Language Models and agentic AI architectures.

• Experience deploying agentic AI systems and multi-agent workflows.

• Experience with Trustworthy AI Responsible AI AI governance or model risk management frameworks.

• Experience optimizing large-scale inference systems and AI infrastructure.

• Experience working in highly regulated environments and mission-critical production systems.

What Youll Gain

This role offers a unique opportunity to operate at the forefront of applied artificial intelligence and help bridge world-class research with real-world impact.

You will:

• Work directly with world-class AI researchers on breakthrough technologies and next-generation AI capabilities.

• Own a critical position in the pipeline that transforms cutting-edge research into client value.

• Tackle some of the most difficult AI engineering scalability and operational challenges in the industry.

• Build AI capabilities that deliver meaningful business outcomes for clients.

• Develop deep expertise in operating advanced AI systems at scale while collaborating with leaders across research product and engineering.

How We Work

Vanguard has implemented a hybrid working model for the majority of our crew members designed to capture the benefits of enhanced flexibility while enabling in-person learning collaboration and connection. We believe our mission-driven and highly collaborative culture is a critical enabler to support long-term client outcomes and enrich the employee experience.